Week 4

This week’s chapter had various breakdowns to it that I found very insightful to my future peer mentor and mentee relationships.

The first breakdown addressed was the peer mentor role as a trusted friend. Building trust between yourself and your mentee is a very important initial foundation to creating a trusted friendship and a connection to the rest of the 5 roles of being a peer mentor. By creating a trusting friendship as a peer mentor, mentees will be more willing to learn from you in their college experience.

The second breakdown was the connecting link of a peer mentor. We as peer mentors have been on campus and been involved a lot more than the new mentees have. We can be there to help link our mentees to different organizations, clubs, and events that fir their interest and will benefit them all around.

The third breakdown was about being a learning coach. The idea of this role is to urge your mentees to work hard academically to meet there goals in order to successfully move on to a great career. By teaching your mentees how to learn and achieve goals they will receive character traits that are essential to many important things in their adult life.

The fourth breakdown out of the five roles of a peer mentor is the role of being a student advocate. There are going to be mentees that have issues arise that you may not be able to handle just being their peer mentor. However, as their peer mentor you are aware of the different services ISU has to offer for advising and support as well as your mentees rights and responsibilities.

The final breakdown is you role as a peer leader. This role is used to inspire goals and visions into your mentees just based on what they can see through you and what you’ve accomplished so far through your college career. When they see what all you as their mentor have accomplished and where you’re headed, your mentees will hopefully become excited about creating goals for themselves so they too can have great success in everything they aspire to.

When I was a freshman, my peer mentor did a great job of combining all of these roles and helping me through my first semester. They built a relationship with me, created connections for me as I needed them, coached me through my academics, were there as a resource for any support I needed, and inspired me to create goals and aspirations for myself in my upcoming college adventure.